I wondered what it would feel like to say, “Hmm . . . no,” and then stand up and get in my car and whip it into traffic, nearly causing a massive accident, and then never talk to her.
“Sure,” I said, “I mean, I feel like we’d better talk.”
She slid into the other side of the booth and then stood right back up. “Could I get something to eat? I’m starving.”
“Yeah, sure, that’s fine. I would, well, maybe I’d have picked somewhere else if I knew we were going to eat.”
“This place isn’t good?” she asked.
“No, it’s really good,” I said. “It’s really good . . . in my opinion.”
“Well, if you say it’s good, I’m going to go with that,” she replied, and she stalked off to order. And then I knew I didn’t want to sit there while she ate, staring at her, so I went and ordered ten Krystals, large fries, two Corn Pups, and a large Dr Pepper. It would be good, I thought, to feel slightly sick as everything changed.
While we ate, she explained who she was, which was nice to hear, because for some reason, I had not even looked her up online. Why had I not looked her up online? I think I wanted to keep believing that it wasn’t real, that I would show up and no one would be there to meet me and I could walk right back into my old life.
She was an art critic, and she focused mostly on lesser-known New York artists, mostly painters, mostly women, but she had discovered a painter named Henry Roosevelt Wilson, and was writing a book about him. He was from upstate New York, a place called Keene, and had lived on a farm with his wife, Henrietta Wilson （Henry and Henrietta, holy god）， and he’d mostly painted these ghostlike portraits on salvaged doors that he purchased at estate sales. He was a fairly minor painter in his lifetime, though he had been in some group exhibitions in New York and San Francisco. He had also been a pitcher and played Double-A for a farm team of the Milwaukee Brewers before he broke his arm trying to climb into a second-story window after curfew. His mother and father had been murdered in a botched robbery when he was seven, and he had lived in an orphanage until he was fourteen, and it was at the orphanage where he had started painting on doors.
Mazzy showed me some images of his work, which were indeed ghostlike, the figures tall and narrow and almost turning to mist in front of you. But they were beautiful. And then she showed me a photo of Henry, who was, holy moly, so handsome. Crazy handsome. Like a farmhand-who-wins-a-modeling-competition-and-then-gets-to-marry-a-princess kind of handsome, with curly brown hair and bright blue eyes and rippling muscles under a loose linen shirt. If you looked like that, I decided, everyone else probably looked like they were dissolving in front of you. How could you paint anyone who wasn’t as pretty as you, so you made it up to them by turning them into ghosts so they wouldn’t feel too bad.
“So,” Mazzy continued, “I went to see Henrietta when I began to research Henry’s life, and she was incredibly reluctant to talk about Henry, really protective of him, and there wasn’t much information available about him, and so I had to really charm her, to tell her how much I loved his paintings, and I think she eventually realized that I could bring her husband’s work to the larger world, which had, you know, mostly ignored him when he was alive. I rented an apartment in Keene, above this old general store, and I’d meet with her every few days. And then, one day, she just kind of, I don’t know, decided that she wasn’t long for this world and Henry was dead, and it was okay to tell me everything. And so she did.”
Henry, Mazzy informed me, had been gay, and Henrietta had known this going into the relationship, but she liked him and he was sweet and he had a huge farm that she loved. And it was nearly impossible for Henry to have many lasting relationships with men in the area, so he was hers more than he was someone else’s. At some point, he met Randolph Avery during a gallery exhibition in Los Angeles, and the two of them formed an intense friendship that lasted the rest of their lives, though it wasn’t physical. Or at least Henrietta had assured Mazzy that it wasn’t. And they stayed in close contact until Avery died. Avery, I knew, had died of AIDS, only a few years after that summer in Coalfield.
I learned about it—well, not that he died of AIDS, because no one would have talked about that in Coalfield, even in the nineties—when I was in college, making out with Aaron. My mom called to tell me that he had died. She said that he’d passed away in his sleep, and I immediately wondered about my backpack, if he had kept it, if his sister would find it. I had been too embarrassed to retrieve it when I still lived in Coalfield, wanted to preserve the possibility that our entire interaction had been a dream. But now, knowing someone else might stumble upon it, I was so nervous, because my backpack had my initials sewn onto it, something my mom had paid ten dollars extra to get, and that seemed like the dumbest way possible to have this discovered. “What do you think will happen to his belongings?” I asked my mom, and immediately I thought, What the fuck are you doing, Frankie?